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For anyone who listens to—or kind of watches, in the background—either 95Money or ABC24 regularly, then you would have picked up that the financial forecasters are very confident that the Australian ASX200 share market index will finally get back to its pre-GFC level of 6,800 (11 years ago) by the close of this year.

As someone who is on the cusp of ‘retiring’ I very much hope they are right.

As you can see from the chart above, the ASX200 has managed to climb up to 6,167 today (22nd Feb, 2019).

As regular readers would be aware, all of the other ‘western’ markets made it back to their pre-GFC levels five or six years ago and are now well above those levels. But, for whatever reason, the Australian market is struggling badly to claw its way back to its pre-GFC levels.

However, as much I so want the market to get back to pre-GFC levels so my retail superannuation fund increases a bit , I am not getting too excited. This is because the experts have been predicting the Australian market would get back to 6,800 for at least three years now.

Also, there seems to be a lot of financial troubles that would work against our market getting back to 6,800. One of our major trading countries, China, seems to be wagging their ‘naughty naughty’ finger at us—especially in relation to coal and iron ore imports, but also for tourism and student numbers from China. As well, government and personal debt is at levels never seen before. Levels that are three times previous peaks. On top of this, the housing/property market has hit bad times with some forecasters expecting prices in Sydney and Melbourne to drop by a further 20 percent during 2019 and other cities to fall by a further 6 to 10 percent.

Even so, I really would like the market to somehow magically get back to 6,800.